Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [54]
There was a soft knock at my door. A knock followed by the tickle of fingernails playing against the wood. It was Neil.
“Come in.”
He opened the door and stepped into my room. “Hi, Jocko,” he said, sitting on my bed, near my head.
“No, dog. You sit at the bottom near my feet or you sit on the floor,” I told him.
His shoulders slumped and his eyes softened. “Please don’t be like that to me tonight. Not tonight. I need you.”
“You do?” I said, closing my pen into my notebook and setting it beside me on the bed. “Good. Then that’s exactly what you won’t have. You deserve to need me, not to have me.” Ours had become a seesaw relationship, and right now it was all saw.
He winced, as if I’d just flicked water in his face.
Good.
“Come on, man. I just can’t stop thinking about you. You’ve got this fucking power over me. It’s like there’s nothing else in my life. Like it’s a stage, all blackened out with only one light in the center. You.”
I did like the idea that he associated me with a stage and professional lighting, but I still wanted to torture him. “Well, that’s too bad for you because I think you’re completely pathetic. You sicken me.”
I’d heard Natalie use the word sicken recently when describing something Agnes had done with a pound of ground hamburger. I’d made a mental note to add that word to my very sparse vocabulary. Right next to panthenol and back-comb.
Neil began to cry. He hunched over and brought his hands up to his face, cupping it, as if he was drinking water from a stream.
“Good, you cry. You deserve to be miserable and suffer. You’re a pathetic failure of a man. I know that I certainly don’t love you anymore.” I hoped I sounded cold and nonchalant.
He turned to me. “Please?”
“No.”
“Please?” He tried to take my hand in his. It was his attempt at begging.
I knew what he was asking. I exhaled with effort. “Fine.” I said. “This one last time.”
“Can we do it up the ass?” he asked, suddenly brighter. “I won’t use spit like last time. We’ll use something. It won’t hurt.”
“Use what?” I was suspicious of him. He’d fucked me up the ass a few months ago, and it hurt like hell. I’d told him to stop but he just kept on going saying, “Don’t worry, the pain goes away, it feels good after a while.” I wasn’t about to get into that trap again.
He scanned my bookshelves and pointed. “That,” he said.
I craned my neck around to see what he had pointed to. It was the yellow tub of Queen Helen’s Cholesterol. I was very fond of this product, which was absorbed almost instantly into the hair. Unlike KMS Repair, which tended to weigh hair down, the old-fashioned Queen Helen’s Cholesterol was light and very effective. I tended to use it at night, while I slept, when a deeper level of conditioning could be achieved.
I yanked off my sweatpants and pulled my T-shirt over my head. Now, because of the hanging basket lamp over my bed, I was lit from above, the most unflattering light, like a hamburger at a fast food restaurant.
His cock was already hard and he began stroking it to make it even stiffer.
I, on the other hand, was completely turned off as I looked at my body under the glaring white light. Not only did I look skinny, but also almost hairless. It was disgusting. If by fourteen I still didn’t have any chest hair or hair on my legs, I figured I could pretty much forget about ever getting any. My brother had hair, but my father didn’t. He was smooth. I hated that you couldn’t choose which genes you got and which ones skipped you.
“Lie back and put your legs in the air,” he said.
I did like he said and he crouched down in front of me between my legs. He reached up for the tub of Queen Helen’s and carelessly tossed the lid